Jesse Vogler

Jesse Vogler comes to PLAND, as our first Special Projects resident, to develop and present Boundary Maintenance: Internal Improvement with support by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Boundary Maintenance: Internal Improvement is an architecturally based project that employs research and intervention at PLAND. During the 2012 and 2013 seasons, PLAND hosts Vogler in-residence, providing on-site access for him to perform open-ended research via land-surveying, performances, a series of architectural sculptures, and a collection of drawings and photographs, resulting in an innovative experimental report of the region’s built environment. Boundary Maintenance speaks to the risks, limits, and assumptions of amateur architecture and examines regional paradoxes regarding official regulations and self-enforced boundaries (even the abandonment of such rules). Through Vogler’s residency, PLAND promotes dialogue within Tres Piedras and broadly considers communities developed though non-traditional means.

Closing Corner I, 2012

Closing Corner II, 2012

PLAND supports Vogler in the production of a small booklet that serves as a record of his research, a general field guide, and a distributable example of PLAND’s Residency and Building Program — an innovative, experimental report of the region’s built environment. Taking the form of a real-estate broadsheet, this document reflects on the speculative history of that literally underlies the land at PLAND. It brings together a synthetic history of land speculation in America and the politics and language of property through the lens of the mid-century land-scam that defined this area of New Mexico.

Booklet, in process

As part of his Special Project residency, Jesse’s artwork was included in Dust in the Machine, a group exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe that provided a spectrum of interpretations of the industrialized West, as well as its promises and failures. In conjunction with the exhibition, Jesse also presented a series of public events that included a performance, a panel discussion and a choreographed work that investigated the material, economic, and psychological spaces of the American landscape.

Jesse Vogler

Jesse Vogler is an artist and architect whose work sits at the intersection of spatial practices, material culture, and political economy. Drawn to questions that attach themselves to the periphery of architectural production, his work takes on themes of work, law, property, expertise, and perfectibility. Recent projects include a series of exhibitions on the administrative landscape with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, an experimental summer field-school on the cultural landscapes of the Americas, and a collaborative project with the Peterborough Fence Viewer as part of a MacDowell Colony residency. He has exhibited at the Venice Biennale for Architecture, the CLUI, the Center for Contemporary Art Santa Fe, and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts; his writing and work has appeared in [bracket], Thresholds, Domus, and Artforum among others. Vogler co-founded the Institute for Marking and Measuring and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art at Washington University in St. Louis.